CERTH is one of the largest Research Centres in Greece and among the TOP-12 EU institutions with the highest participation in competitive research grants. CERTH, with an average annual turnover of more than 50 m€, has important scientific and technological achievements in many areas including among others: Clean Energy, Green Hydrogen, Electrification, AI, IoT, Industry 4.0, Smart Cities, Circular Economy, Transportation & Sustainable Mobility, Health, Agro-biotechnology, Smart farming, and Safety & Security. CERTH has also received numerous awards and distinctions such as the European Descartes Prize, the Microsoft International Contest Prize, the Trading Agents Competition Award and many more. From CERTH, the Chemical Process and Energy Resources Institute (CPERI) will participate in the ECOLEFINS project.

CPERI aims to develop pioneering technologies and innovative products and to pursue scientific and technological excellence in selected advanced areas of Chemical Engineering, including Clean Energy, Climate and Environment, Sustainable Industry and Bioengineering/Biomedicine, Materials Technology, Process Engineering and Simulation. In specific, CPERI’s research activities are targeting to develop and promote modern technologies for the low-carbon production, storage and capture of energy and novel technologies for natural resource management, pollution, environmental protection and health, placing CPERI as the “Low Carbon Economy Technologies Institute”.

The current project will be pursuit by the Laboratory of Environmental Fuels and Hydrocarbons (LEFH). LEFH is active in a wide range of applications related to the production of renewable fuels and chemicals, low emissions environmental technologies (DeSOx/DeNOx), synthesis and characterization of new catalytic materials, as well as, to renewable energy sources and zero-carbon fuels technologies. Moreover, LEFH provides technical support to refining and bio-refining industry and focuses on various processes and especially on Fluid Catalytic cracking (FCC), Hydroprocessing (HDS/HPC), Isomerization, Alkylation, Reforming, Biomass Catalytic Pyrolysis, Bio-fuels upgrading, Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR).

George Marnellos, (Chemical Engineer), Project Coordinator in ECOLEFINS, is currently a Professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, AUTH. His research activities are focusing in the fields of hydrocarbons processing (natural gas vaporization and production of olefins), hydrogen (iso-octane and bioethanol reforming, steam and H2S electrolysis, electrochemical membrane reactors for hydrogen generation and separation) and fuel cell (direct hydrocarbon and solid carbon high temperature ceramic fuel cells) technologies, CO2 utilization (hydrogenation to methanol and methane, electrolysis toward CO), air pollution control (NOX, VOCs, etc) and biomass to energy conversion technologies (pyrolysis and gasification of solid biomass and biochar). His scientific work has been published in 96 articles in international journals and in >150 conferences’ proceedings with more than 3100 citations (H = 31). He is a regular reviewer in relevant scientific Journals and research funding agencies. In 2010, he obtained the Fulbright research scholarship to cooperate with MIT (Prof. Yang Shao Horn, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering) in the research field of fuel cells. From 2016 till 2023, he was the chairman of the Cluster of Bioeconomy and Environment in Western Macedonia (CluBE) and since 2020 he is the associate editor of the “Hydrogen” journal of MDPI Editions.

Dr Angelos Lappas is Research Director at CPERI/CERTH. He participated as main researcher, in more than 60 European and National research projects and he has 150 publications in ISI scientific journals, more than 250 papers in various symposia and conferences, 9000 citations and a SCOPUS h index 47. He is the Scientific Director of the Laboratory of Environmental Fuels/Biofuels and Hydrocarbons (LEFH) of CPERI. LEFH has major pilot plant and bench scale facilities that are recognized as unique in international scale. Dr. Lappas collaborated with more than 150 oil-refining, petrochemical, bio-refining and engineering companies all over the world and among them major companies like BP, EXXONMOBIL, TOTAL, REPSOL, UOP, KBR, SABIC, BASF, VALMET etc.
His research fields are: catalytic reaction engineering, refining processing, biomass thermo-chemical conversion processes, production of new fuels, biofuels and e-fuels, Catalyst poisoning characterization and deactivation, Catalyst evaluation from micro to pilot scale, CO2 catalytic conversion processes and Environmental catalytic processes (SOx, NOx, CO and CH4 reduction).

Dr Antzela Fivga is currently a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chemical Process and Energy Resources Institute (CPERI) of the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH) in Thessaloniki, Greece. She obtained her MEng in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Western Macedonia (Greece) in 2007 and her PhD in Chemical Engineering from Aston University (UK) in 2012. Her thesis focused on the upgrading of bio-oil in terms of its quality as a bio-fuel and/or source of green chemicals, and contributed to the EC Biosynergy project, which evaluated bio-refineries for transport fuels. She has over 10 years of academic and industrial experience in the field of sustainable biofuels, specialising in advanced thermochemical conversion processes, waste to energy, techno-economic process simulation, and pyrolysis. In 2019, she was a project manager for Supergen Energy Storage Network+ (UK), focused on the wider advancement, exchange and dissemination of energy storage research and expertise.

Dr Stelios (Stylianos) Stefanidis obtained his PhD from the University of Western Macedonia in 2016 after defending his thesis on the topic of “Catalytic pyrolysis of biomass for the production of alternative biofuels and high-added value chemical products”, which was carried out at the Chemical Process and Energy Resources Institute (CPERI) of the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH) in Thessaloniki, Greece. Between 2018 and 2020, he was a Marie Curie post-doctoral fellow at Aston University in Birmingham, UK, where he worked on the synthesis, characterisation and evaluation of hierarchical zeolites as catalysts in the catalytic pyrolysis of biomass. Since 2020, he has been an Associate Researcher at CPERI-CERTH, where he is working on the development of catalytic thermochemical and hydrothermal processes for the valorisation of biomass and solid wastes to fuels and chemical products. He has co-authored 32 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, which have accumulated over 2,769 citations (h index = 20).